Charles Seife | The NSA broke its word

Ex-employees must speak against abuse

2:18 PM,
Aug. 25, 2013

Written by

Charles Seife
| Slate

NEW YORK - Most people don't know the history of Von Neumann Hall, the nearly windowless building hidden behind the engineering quadrangle at Princeton. I found out my junior year, when, as a bright-eyed young math major, I was recruited to work at the National Security Agency.

Von Neumann Hall was the former site of the Institute for Defense Analyses, a math-heavy research organization that did work for an agency that, at that time, dared not speak its name. The close ties between Princeton and the NSA went back decades, I discovered, and some of the professors I had been learning from were part ...